I know what you’re thinking.  ”Yeah, so Cameron gave a little nod to ‘Aliens’ with the AMP suits in ‘Avatar,’ so what?”  My friend, you are in for treat.  Everything from greedy corporate and military stooges invading an alien planet to the presence of Sigourney Weaver, “Avatar” and “Aliens” are literally the same movie.

Visit The Oatmeal for a detailed side-by-side photo comparison of this two-part James Cameron film separated by 30 years.

His impressive box office run includes blockbusters “Terminator Salvation,” “Clash of the Titans” and the most profitable movie ever made, “Avatar.”

Whether it’s loyalty to his motherland or his love of surfing, Worthington has decided his next project will be, by his standards, a quaint little indie film — a surfing drama called “Drift” set in Margaret River, Western Australia.

The West Australian newspaper reports that “Drift” has acquired an $11 million budget, and is slated to begin shooting next fall when the biggest waves and prettiest sunsets color the seascape, and if possible, to coincide with the Margaret River Pro surfing event.

“I’m a WA boy at heart and to go back there and put something back into my home town is something I am really looking forward to,” Worthington told the paper.  ”There’s something pure and true about surfing, and there is something pure and true about this script.”

“Drift” is based on surfing’s dramatic evolution from a pastime to a globally recognized sport, culture and industry.  Worthington’s character is a photo-journalist who had a hand in that transformation.

Tim Duffy and Myles Pollard will produce, and Morgan O’Neill and Ben Nott will direct.

The additional footage in the “Avatar” re-release will contain rainforest footage, a hunting sequence, an emotional scene near the end, a Na’vi counterattack after the bulldozer attack, some awesome high flying action and more. “The best CG in the film has been added as far as facial performance” Cameron said.

As for the the highly anticipated second and third “Avatar” films which Cameron is set on making, he said he has an overall story arc for both films, but has been reworking the script for “Avatar 2″ after spending time recently with native tribes in the Amazon basin.  It may yet be a while before that script is ready for shooting.

Cameron is currently working furiously on the “Avatar” novel.  It will correspond with the events of the first movie though it is not clear how close to the that story it will tread.  It will be a few months before that’s finished and will be even longer before it’s ready for bookstores.

A staunch supporter of 3D technology in film, Cameron was confident that what many consider a gimmick is here to stay. He predicted that within two years 3D cameras will have flooded the film and TV industries and the current concerns like “It’s too difficult. There are too many problems. It costs too much. It adds 6 months to post-production…” will be a thing of the past.

The mega filmmaker also talked about producing Guillermo del Toro’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” the technical aspects of converting “Titanic” to 3D and his conversations with Steven Spielberg about converting his older films to 3D. For the full interview click here.

Below is 20th Century Fox’s official press release announcing James Cameron’s epic special effects bonanza’s return to theaters:

“On August 27, return to Pandora and re-experience James Cameron’s History-Making Epic film, with more than Eight Minutes of Never Before Seen Footage- exclusively in Digital 3D and IMAX® 3D. Since – and largely as of result of – AVATAR’s release last December, the number of available digital 3D screens has exploded, and moviegoers who missed experiencing the film in 3D, as well as fans that want to return to Pandora again, will now have that opportunity.”

Visit the official website for details and go here for dates and locations.

For example: I often find myself writing things like, “The acting was atrocious, the script could have been written by a 3rd grader and the direction was all over the map, but at least the visual effects were spectacular.”  It seems studios are now focusing more heavily than ever on making something look cool to please the fanboys at the utter expense of character and story.  I’d be hard pressed to find a handful of blockbusters in the past five years, with the exception of last year’s “Star Trek,” to which I couldn’t apply that criticism.

And as hard as I try to infuse my criticism with as much creativity as possible, I fully expected my review of Louis Leterrier’s remake of Desmond Davis’ 1981 cult classic, “Clash of the Titans,” to contain a similar phrase.  And indeed, the acting is atrocious and the offensively bad script most probably could have been written by an elementary school student, but unfortunately for us all, this particular iteration of the mindless Hollywood action flick cannot even count an array of impressive visual effects among its redeeming qualities.  This criticism is not a slight to the design team.  I found some of the creature designs and landscapes to be quite good, actually.  But the technical execution of those designs felt thrown together, choppy and poorly incorporated into the fabric of a broader universe.  I could levy this blame on the technical craftsman who developed the CGI effects and who were responsible for assimilating the effects into a practical environment, but it all ends up on the director’s desk.  He is responsible for communicating his vision and molding the work of hundreds of individuals into a cohesive unit that tells a story.

“Clash of the Titans” feels like a hundred different little visions smashing into each other for 106 minutes.

I’ve never claimed to be a cinema elitist.  Sure, I love Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” and Antonioni’s “L’avventura,” but also love “Back to the Future” and “Jaws.”  A good movie is a good movie whether it cost $100 or $100,000,000 to make.  And by every conceivable means of evaluation, “Clash of the Titans” is a terrible movie.

Michael De Luca is set to produce.

THR reports that the spec script written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, which centers on the origins of Dracula and includes many factual facets of the life of the famous Prince Vlad the Impaler, depicts Dracula as an anti-hero of sorts caught in a tragic love story.

Alissa Phillips will executive produce.

“Year Zero” marks Worthington’s first deal since playing paraplegic war veteran, Jake Sully, in “Avatar.”

In the meantime the Aussie-born star can be seen in the Helen Mirren thriller “The Debt,” as well as in the upcoming update of the classic sword and sandals tale, “Clash of the Titans.”

Distributor 20th Century Fox confirmed that “Avatar” had surpassed “Titanic’s” previous worldwide gross theatrical revenue record of $1.843 billion early Monday with a current total of $1.859 billion, and counting.

Keys to “Avatar’s” success are its massive foreign numbers having raked in 70% of its gross from markets outside of the US and Canada.  Even more critical in its victory over Cameron’s own “Titanic” is its employment of new 3D technology as a source of revenue.  The latest tallies show that roughly 80% of “Avatar’s” worldwide revenues derive from 3D ticket prices, which are generally a few dollars higher than standard movie ticket prices.

Domestically, however, “Titanic” is still king.  “Avatar’s” $555 million domestic earnings are just short of “Titanic’s” 1997 record of $600 million.

Still, it’s up for debate where “Avatar” stands in the history of mega-successful films.  Many are calling “Avatar” The Biggest Movie of All-Time thanks to its box-office triumph, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most watched film ever.  Factor in inflation and ticket sales and surprisingly, “Avatar” doesn’t even crack the top 25.

Top 20 biggest movies of all-time in ticket sales:

1. “Gone With the Wind” (1939) 202,044,600
2. “Star Wars” (1977) 178,119,600
3. “The Sound of Music” (1965) 142,415,400
4. “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) 141,854,300
5. “The Ten Commandments” (1956) 131,000,000
6. “Titanic” (1997) 128,345,900
7. “Jaws” (1975) 128,078,800
8. “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) 124,135,500
9. “The Exorcist” (1973) 110,568,700
10. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) 109,000,000
11. “101 Dalmatians” (1961) 99,917,300
12. “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) 98,180,600
13. “Ben-Hur” (1959) 98,000,000
14. “Return of the Jedi” (1983) 94,059,400
15. “The Sting” (1973) 89,142,900
16. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) 88,141,900
17. “Jurassic Park” (1993) 86,205,800
18. “The Graduate” (1967) 85,571,400
19. “Star Wars: Episode I” (1999) 84,825,800
20. “Fantasia” (1941) 83,043,500

“Avatar” clocks-in way down at No. 26 in all-time ticket sales with 76,421,000 tickets sold, and counting.

Apparently Mr. Cameron knows something the rest of us don’t.

His first film since 1997′s record smashing, $1.8 billion-grossing “Titanic,” has become the second-highest-grossing film ever, with a current tally of $1.14 billion worldwide, and rising.

“Avatar” arrived at No. 2 after passing Peter Jackson’s epic J.R.R Tolkien adaptation, “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King,” and effectively gives Cameron the top two spots.

The film, which features Sam Worthington (“Terminator Salvation”) as Jake Sully, a paraplegic war veteran who travels to a distant planet called Pandora and becomes involved in the culture of the indigenous inhabitants called the Na’vi, is only the fifth movie ever to top the $1 billion mark.

What’s even more impressive about “Avatar’s” massive success is that it has occurred in only three weeks, putting it on pace to give “Titanic” a legitimate run for its money (pardon the pun).

CLICK HERE TO READ OUR “AVATAR” REVIEW

I was made by a computer!

There are big movies, and then there are BIG movies.  James Cameron’s technical chef d’oeuvre and decade-long undertaking, “Avatar,” is neither — it’s bigger.  It occupies a category of colossal movie-making so unspeakably behemothic that taxonomy itself may take years to catch up.  From the same director who gave us “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” and “Titanic,” both the most expensive films of their time, and with a budget somewhere in the ballpark of $4oo million, I suppose nothing less than sheer grandeur and cutting-edge spectacle should have been expected.

But considering its admittedly impressive technical achievements, some see “Avatar” as more than merely an astonishing visual experience.  Its revolutionary employment of performance capture CGI technology has been compared to the first enchanted moments of synchronized audio in 1927′s “The Jazz Singer,” or to the innovative usage of Technicolor in pictures like “The Wizard of Oz” or “Gone With the Wind.”  And from a purely methodological perspective, it’s hard to argue with those comparisons.  Throughout my screening I repeatedly leaned over to the person next to me to whisper, “Can you believe that’s computer imaging?!”

Cameron, astoundingly, has managed to sidestep, or rather build an incredibly expensive bridge across the Uncanny Valley of human likeness that has devoured all of Robert Zemeckis’ motion capture endeavors, notably “The Polar Express,” and “Beowulf.”  “Avatar” unquestionably represents a watershed moment in the advancement of technical filmmaking.  But film is a multi-faceted, dynamic art form that requires a number of elements to work in concert to produce a fluid work of substantial merit.

What about “Avatar’s” narrative, direction, performances, score, pacing, editing and even morals?  The three revolutionary films mentioned above aren’t canonized merely for advancing the technology of filmmaking.  All are sound and complete entities and have appeared on various reputable lists of the greatest films ever made, an honor James Cameron’s magnum opus could never dream of being awarded.  It seems Cameron has decided not only that bigger is better, but that big is the only game in town — character development, narrative integrity and good writing be damned.

The acting is atrocious.  Sam Worthington, who was the best thing about the otherwise insufferable “Terminator Salvation,” is flat and uninteresting here.  And his American accent needs a lot of work which only compounds the problem of his relentless, tiresome and utterly unnecessary narration.  One of Hollywood’s most consistent and reliable supporting players, Giovanni Ribisi (“Saving Private Ryan,” “Lost in Translation”), delivers a laughably caricatured characterization as the malevolent business-monger, Parker Selfridge. The generally riveting Sigourney Weaver is reduced to nothing more than a cardboard cutout spouting platitudes as the unsubtly named, Grace Augustine.  And the walking cliché, hard-nosed Colonel Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang (“Gettysburg,” “Tombstone”), may just be the most banal, least nuanced film character of the decade.  Ironically, Neytiri, the giant blue alien played by Zoe Saldana (“Star Trek”), is the only sympathetic and recognizably human character in the entire film.

Perhaps “Avatar’s” most egregious deficiency, however, and the most likely culprit for the ungodly performances, lies with the script.  Do we really need to hear another movie character utter the words, “You are not in Kansas anymore,” ever again?  After a decade of mulling over this script, it’s hard to believe Cameron still couldn’t avoid the most elementary pitfalls of screenwriting.  The little rock the American mercenaries are after is literally named “unobtanium” for crying out loud!  But Cameron is no dummy.  He’s a socially conscious auteur capable of crafting genuinely compelling art.  “Avatar” is loaded with references to current events and oozes anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-imperialism, pro-environment sentiments, which is terrific.  Good art should not only be an effigy of the state of society, but comment on it.  “Avatar” certainly does that, but in such a pedestrian, boorish way that its messages are all but rendered impotent.  Does Cameron really think his audience needs to hear the words, “Shock and Awe” to make the already obvious connection to Operation Iraqi Freedom?

So “Avatar” is crucially flawed.  But is it fun?  You bet it is.  It’s one helluva good time.  Although it’s an uneven amalgamation of “Dances With Wolves,” “Braveheart,” “Lord of the Rings,” and Cameron’s own “Titanic,” and fails to live up to any of them, “Avatar” still manages to dazzle in delightful and unexpected ways sure to leave even the most skeptical viewers awestruck, at least superficially.  The visual experience is that good.  Cameron was clearly determined to turn the world of visual effects on its head, a goal he’s more than achieved.  But he’s left a paramount casualty in good storytelling in his $400 million wake.